“Dearest Aunt Dorothy,—“were in murree and we got a servant that wigles his toes when we speak to him and he loves baba and makes noises like him and there are squiboos in thetres—”
“Dearest Aunt Dorothy,—
“were in murree and we got a servant that wigles his toes when we speak to him and he loves baba and makes noises like him and there are squiboos in thetres—”
—(she means squirrels)—
“—and ive got a parrot uncle tony bought me and uncle tony says the monsoon will praps fale and the peple wont have anything to eat but weve lots and i like this better than kohat the shops are lovely but there are lots of flees and they bite baba and he cries this is a long letter how are jackie and noel i got thephotograf—”
“—and ive got a parrot uncle tony bought me and uncle tony says the monsoon will praps fale and the peple wont have anything to eat but weve lots and i like this better than kohat the shops are lovely but there are lots of flees and they bite baba and he cries this is a long letter how are jackie and noel i got thephotograf—”
—(that’s the new one on the mantelpiece)—
“—were going to tifin at major hirsts little girls one is called marjorie and were greatfriends——”
“—were going to tifin at major hirsts little girls one is called marjorie and were greatfriends——”
“Where’s the other page got to? It was here——”
She found the other page, and continued the reading of the child’s letter.
Suddenly Lady Tasker interrupted her.
“Had Jack to borrow money to send them up there?”
“To Murree? I really don’t know. Perhaps he had. But as adjutant of the Railway Volunteers he’d have his saloon.”
“H’m!... Anyway, the child oughtn’t to be there at all. India’s no place for children.”
“I know, auntie; but what can one do? They do come.”
“H’m!... They didn’t to me. Thank goodness I’ve done with love and babies.” (Dorothy laughed, perhaps at a mental vision of the houses in Ludlow and Cromwell Gardens.) “Anyway, now they are here somebody’s got to look after them. They may as well be healthy....”
She mused, and Dorothy reached for other letters.
Lady Tasker’s additions to her responsibilities usually began in this way. Dorothy had very little doubt that presently little Dot also would be handed like a parcel to some man or other coming home on leave, and Lady Tasker would send to the makers for yet another cot.... Therefore, pushing aside her last letter, she exclaimed almost crossly, “Idothink it’s selfish of Aunt Eliza! There she is, with Spurrs all to herself, and she never once thinks that Jack might like to send Dot to England!”
“Neither would I if I had my time over again,” said Lady Tasker resolutely. “You needn’t look like that—I wouldn’t. Cromwell Gardens is past praying for, and in another year there won’t be a stick at the Brear that’s fit to be seen. The next batch I certainly intend to charge for. I’m on the brink of the poor-house as it is.”
This time it was Dorothy who mused. She was a calculating young woman; the wife of His Impudence had to be; and she was far too shrewd to suppose for a moment that her aunt could ever escape her destiny, which was to be imposed upon by her own flesh and blood while hardening her heart against the rest of the world. Dorothy, and not Stan, had had to keep that flat going, and the flat before it; unless Fortune & Brooks turned up trumps—a rather remote contingency—she would have to continue to do so; and she was quite casuistical enough to argue that, while Aunt Eliza might keep her old Spurrs, Aunt Grace might properly be victimized because Dorothy loved Aunt Grace. Thereforethere were musings in Dorothy’s wide-angle blue eyes ... musings that only the sound of a key in the outer lock interrupted.
“Hallo, that’s His Impudence,” Dorothy exclaimed. “I do hope he hasn’t brought anybody. I shall simply rush out if he has.”
Stan hadn’t. He came in at the door drawing off a pair of lemon-yellow gloves, said “Hallo, Aunt Grace,” and rang the bell. He next said, “Hallo, Dot! Been out? Beastly smelly in town. No, I’ve not had tea. Look here, you’ve eaten all the hot cakes; never mind; bread and butter’ll do, if you’ve got some jam—no, honey. Got an invitation for you, Dot, to lunch, with Ferrers on Monday; can’t you buck up and manage it?... Well, Aunt Grace, what brings you up here? Bit off your beat, isn’t it? Awfully rude of me, I know, but it is a long way. Glad I came in.”
“I’ve been to see the Cosimo Pratts,” said Lady Tasker.
Dorothy looked suddenly up.
“Oh, auntie, you didn’t tell me that!” she exclaimed.
A grin lighted up Stan’s good-looking face.
“Oh? How many annas to the rupee are they to-day? By Jove, they are a rum lot up there! Any new prime cuts?”
“Stan, you mustn’t!” said Dorothy, peremptorily. “Please don’t! Don’t listen to him, auntie; he’s outrageous.”
But His Impudence went on, with his mouth full of bread and butter.
“I’ve only seen the fore-quarter and the trotter, butyou see I haven’t been over the house. Did they show you the Bluebeard’s Chamber? What is there there? By Jove, it’s like Jezebel and the dogs.... But I don’t suppose they’ll have me up again. There was some chap there, and I got him by himself and told him he didn’t know what he was talking about; rotten of me, I know, but you should have heard him! Anarchist—Votes for Women—all the lot; whew!... More tea, Ruth,please——”
Lady Tasker felt the years beginning to ebb away from her again. She had remembered the hammock and the Invisible Men.
“I hope he was—English?” she murmured.
“Who?”
“The man you say you were rude to.”
“English? Yes. Why? English? Rather! No end of gas about the Empire. Said it was on a wrong basis or something. Why do you ask?”
“I only wondered.”
But Stan was perspicacious; he could see anything that was as closely thrust under his nose as is the comparative rarity of the Englishman in Hampstead. He laughed.
“Oh, that! We’re used to that. We’ve all sorts up here.... By Jove, I believe Aunt Grace has been thrown into the arms of a Jap or a nigger or something! Well, if that doesn’t put the lid on!... So of course you wondered what I meant by the fore-quarter and Jezebel and the dogs. Those are just some things they used to have.... Well, I’ll tell you what you can do about it next time, auntie. You talk to ’em about Ludlow.That shuts ’em up. Sore spot, Ludlow; they’re trying to forget about Ye Olde Englysshe Maypole, and that row with old Wynn-Jenkins, and old Griffin letting his hair grow and reciting those poems. They look at you as if it never happened. But they didn’t shutmeup.”
“You seem to have been thoroughly rude,” Lady Tasker remarked.
“Well, dash it all, they ask for it. She used to be some sort of a pal ofDorothy’s——”
“She’s very clever, and she was always very kind to me,” Dorothy interpolated over her sewing.
“When, I should like to know? But never mind. I was going to say, Aunt Grace, that I’ve had to put my foot down. I won’t have the Bits meeting those kids of Pratt’s. It’s perfectly awful; why, those children know as much as I do—and I know a bit! They’ll be wanting latchkeys presently. That day I was up there I heard one of ’em say that little boys weren’t the same as little girls. I forget how she put it, but she knew all right; think of that, at about four! I wish I could remember the words, but it was a bit thick forfour!——”
A restrained smile, perhaps at the thought of Stan putting his foot down, had crossed Lady Tasker’s face; no doubt it was part of the smile that she presently said, toying with the little gold-rimmed glass, “Quite right, Stan.... Anything fresh about Fortune & Brooks? Dorothy told me.”
Stan’s feelings on any subject were never so strong but that at a word he was quite ready to talk aboutsomething else. “Eh? Rather!” he said heartily, and went straightway off at score.—New? Yes. He’d seen old Brooks the day before; not a bad chap at all really; and they quite understood one another, he and old Brooks. He’d told Stan things, old Brooks had, (which Stan wasn’t at liberty to disclose) about the commissions they paid for really first-class introductions, things that would astonish LadyTasker!——
“You see,” he explained, “as Brooks himself said, they can’t afford to advertise in the ordinary way;infra dig. They’d actually lose custom if they put an ad. in the ‘Daily Spec.’ I don’t mean that they don’t put a thing now and then into the right kind of paper, but just being mentioned in general conversation, at dinners and tamashas and so on, that’stheirkind of advertisement! For instance—but just a minute, and I’ll showyou——”
He jumped up and dashed out of the room. Lady Tasker took advantage of his absence to give a discreet glance at Dorothy, but Dorothy’s head remained bent demurely over her work. Stan returned, carrying a small parcel.
“Here we are,” he said, unfastening the package: and then suddenly his voice and manner changed remarkably. He took a small pot from the parcel and set it on the palm of his left hand; he pointed at it with the index-finger of his right hand; and a bright and poster-like smile overspread his face. He spoke slightly loudly, and very, very persuasively.
“Now I have here, Aunt Grace, one of our newest lines—Pickled Banyan. Now I’m not going to ask youto take my word for it; I want you to try it for yourself. It isn’t what this man says or what that man says; tasting’s believing. Give me your teaspoon.”
“MydearStan!” the astonished Lady Tasker gasped.
“We’re selling a great many of this particular article, and are prepared to stake our reputation on it,” Stan went on. “Established 1780; more than One Hundred Gold Medals. Those are our credentials. Those are what we lose.—Pass your spoon.”
Lady Tasker was rigid. Perhaps Stan would have been better advised to cast his spell over those who were going up in the world, and not on those who, like themselves, were coming down or barely holding their own. Again he went on, pointing engagingly at the small pot.
“But just try it,” he urged, pushing the pot under his aunt’s nose. “It isn’t what this man says or—I mean, it doesn’t cost you anything to try it. A free trial invited. Here’s the recipe, look, on the bottle—carefully selected Banyans, best cane sugar, lemon-juice refined by a patent process, and a touch of tabasco. The makers’ guarantee on every label—none genuine without it—have a go!”
With a “Really, Stan!” Lady Tasker had turned away in her chair, revolted. “And do you expect to go to a house again after an exhibition like that?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Eh?” said Stan, a little discomfited. “Too much salesman about it, d’you think? Brooks warned me about that. Fact is, he had a chap in as a sort of object-lesson.This chap came in—I didn’t know they had schools and classes for this kind of thing, did you?—this chap came in, and I was supposed to be somebody who didn’t want the stuff at any price, and he’d got to sell it to me whether I wanted it or not, and old Brooks said to me, ‘Now ask him how much the beastly muck is,’ and a lot of facers like that, and so we’d a set-to.... Then, when the fellow had gone, he said he’d had him in just to show me hownotto do it.... But he was an ingenious sort of beast, and I can’t get his talk out of my head. I’d thought of having a shot at it to-night, but perhaps I’d better practise a bit more first. Thanks awfully for the criticism, Aunt Grace. If you don’t mind I’ll practise on you as we go along. I’m dining with a man to-night, but I’d better be sure of my ground.—Now what about having the Bits in, Dot?”
“I think I hear them coming,” said Dorothy, whose demureness had not given as much as a flicker. Perhaps she was wondering whether she could spare the sovereign His Impudence would presently ask her for.
The door opened, and Noel and Jackie stood there with a nurse behind them. Noel walked stoutly in. Jackie, not yet very firm on his pins, bumbled after him like an overladen bee.
Stanwas quite right in supposing that the Cosimo Pratts wished to forget all about the Ludlow experiment that had disturbed the Shropshire country-side a year or more before, but he was wrong in the reason he assigned them. They were not in the least ashamed of it. As a stage in their intellectual development, the experiment had been entirely in its place. Especially in Mrs. Pratt’s career—as an old student of the McGrath School of Art, a familiar (for a time) with Poverty in cheap studios, the painter of the famous Feminist picture “Barrage,” and so forward—had this been true. Cosimo, in “The Life and Work of Miss Amory Towers,” a labour to which he devoted himself intermittently, pointed out the naturalness and inevitability of the sequence with real eloquence. Step had led to step, and the omission of any one step would have ruined the whole.
But nobody with work still in them lingers long over the past. They had dropped the task of regenerating rural England, or rather had handed it over to others, only when it had been pointed out to them that capacity so rare as theirs ought to be directed to larger ends. One evening there had put in an appearance at one of the Ludlow meetings—a meeting of the Hurdy-gurdyOctette, which afterwards gave instrumental performances with such success at Letchworth, Bushey and Golder’s Green—Mr. Strong, the original founder and present editor of the “Novum Organum,” or, as it was usually called, the “Novum.” Mr. Strong, as it happened, was the man whom the scatter-brained Stan had met at The Witan, and of whom he had expected that impossibility of any man whomsoever—an admission that he did not know what he was talking about. At that time Mr. Strong had been perambulating the country with a Van, holding meetings and distributing literature; and whatever Mr. Strong’s other failings might have been, nobody had ever said of him that he did not recognize a good thing when he saw it. The Cause itself had served as an introduction between him and Cosimo; it had also been a sufficient reason for his inviting himself to Cosimo’s house for a couple of days and remaining there for three weeks; and then he had got rid of the Van and had come again. He was a rapturous talker, when there was an end to be gained, and he had expressed himself as strongly of the opinion that, magnificent a field for the sowing of the good seed as the country-side was, there was simply stupendous propaganda to be done in London. He knew (he had gone on) that Mrs. Pratt would forgive him (he had a searching blue eye and an actor’s smile) if he appeared for a moment to speak disparagingly of what he might call the mere graces of the Movement, (alluring as these were in Mrs. Pratt’s capable and very pretty hands); it was not disparagement really; he only meant that these garlands would burgeon a hundred-fold if the sternand thankless work was got out of the way first. Mr. Strong had a valuable trick of suddenly making those searching blue eyes of his more searching, and of switching off the actor’s smile altogether; both of these things had happened as he had gone on to point out that what the Cause was really languishing for was a serious and responsible organ; and then, and only then, when they had got (so to speak) the diapason, there would be time enough for the trills and appoggiaturas of the Hurdy-gurdy Band.
Before the end of Mr. Strong’s second visit Cosimo had put up the greater part of the money for the “Novum.”
So you see just where the feather-pated Stan was wrong. The Cosimo Pratts were not outfaced from anything; they had merely seen a new and heralding light. They did not so much recede from the Rural Experiment, and discussions of the Suffrage, and eating buns on the floor at assemblies of the Poets’ Club, and a hundred and twenty other such things, as become as it were translated. They still shed over these activities the benignity of their approval, but from on high now. Amory could no longer be expected actually to “run” the Suffrage Shop herself—Dickie Lemesurier did that; nor the “Eden” (the new offshoot off the Lettuce Grill)—that she left to Katie Deedes; nor the “Lectures on Love” Agency—that was quite safe in the hands of her friends, Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish. Amory merely shed approval down. She washors concours. She ... but you really must readCosimo’s book. You will find it all there (or at any rate a good deal of it).
For Amory Pratt, in so far as Cosimo was the proprietor of the “Novum,” was the proprietor of the proprietor of a high-class weekly review that was presently going to put the two older parties out of business entirely. She had more than a Programme now; she had a Policy. She had crossed the line into thehaute politique. Her At Homes were already taking on the character of the political salon, and between herself and the wives of ministers and ambassadors were differences, in degree perhaps, but not in kind. And that even these differences should become diminished she had taken on, ever since her settling-down at The Witan, slight, but significant, new attitudes and condescensions. She was kinder and more gracious to her sometime equals than before. She gave them encouraging looks, as much as to say that they need not be afraid of her. But it was quite definitely understood that when she took Mr. Strong apart under the copper beech or retired with him into the studio at the back of the house, she must on no account be disturbed.—Mr. Strong, by the way, always dressed in the same Norfolk jacket, red tie and soft felt hat, and his first caution to Cosimo and Amory had been that Brimby, the novelist, was an excellent chap, but not always to be taken very seriously.
Amory did not often put in an appearance at the “Novum’s” offices. This was not that she thought it more befitting that Mr. Strong should wait on her, for she went about a good deal with Mr. Strong, and didnot always trouble him to come up to The Witan to fetch her. It was, rather, if the truth must be told, that she found the offices rather dingy. Her senses loved the newly-machined smell of each new issue of the paper, but not the mingled odour of dust and stale gum and Virginia cigarettes of the place whence it came. Moreover, the premises were rather difficult to find. They lay at the back of Charing Cross Road. You dodged into an alley between a second-hand bookseller’s and a shop where electric-light fittings were sold, entered a narrow yard, and, turning to the right into a gas-lighted cavern where were stacked hundreds and hundreds of sandwich-boards, some back-and-fronts, some with the iron forks for the bearer’s shoulders, you ascended by means of a dark staircase to the second floor. There, at the end of a passage which some poster-artist had half papered with the specimens of his art, you came upon the three rooms. The first of these was the general office; the second was Mr. Strong’s private office; and the third was a room which, the “Novum” having no need of it, Mr. Strong had thought he might as well use as a rent-free bedroom as not. The door of this room Mr. Strong always kept locked. It was more prudent. He was supposed to live somewhere in South Kentish Town, and gave this address to certain of his correspondents. The letters of these reached him sooner or later, through the agency of a barber, in whose window was a placard, “Letters may be addressed here.”
Perhaps, too, the extraordinary people who visited Mr. Strong in the way of business helped to keep Amory away. For an endless succession of the queerestpeople came—contributors, and would-be contributors, and friends of the Cause who “were just passing and thought they’d look in,” and artists seeking a paper with the courage to print really stinging caricatures, and article-writers who were out of a job only because they dared to tell the truth about things, and Russian political exiles, and Armenians who wanted passages to America, and Eurasians who wanted rifles, and tramps, and poets, and the boy from the milkshop who brought in the bread and butter and eggs for Mr. Strong’s breakfast. And out of these strange elements had grown up the paper’s literary style. This was unique in London journalism: philosophical, yet homely; horizon-wide of outlook, yet never without hope that the shining thing in the gutter might prove to be a jewel; and, despite its habitual omissions of the prefix “Mr.” from the names of statesmen, and its playful allusions to this personage’s nose or the waist-measurement of the other, with more than a little of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine about it. “Damn” and “Hell” were words the “Novum” commonly used. Once Amory had demurred at the use of a word stronger still. But Mr. Strong had merely replied, “If I can say it to you I think I can say it to them.” He was no truckler to his proprietors, and anyhow, the man whom the word had encarnadined was only a colliery-owner.
The “Novum” had hardly been six weeks old when a certain desire on Amory’s part to make experiment of her power had, putatively at any rate, lost it money. The little collision of wills had come about over the question of whether the “Novum” should admit advertisementsto its columns or not. Now as most people know, that is a question that seldom arises in journalism. A question far more likely to arise is whether the advertisements can be got. But when a journal sets out to do something that hitherto has not only not been done, but has not even been attempted, you will admit that the case is special. The experience of other papers is useless; their economics do not apply. What did apply was the fact that Mrs. Pratt had been an artist, looked on sheets of paper from another angle than that of the mere journalist and literary man, and loved symmetry and could not endure unsightliness. Besides, “No Compromise” was the “Novum’s” motto, and what was the good of having a motto like that if you compromised in the very form of your expression?... A “shoulder-piece,” “The Little Mary Emollient,” had brought out all Mrs. Pratt’s finer artistic instincts. Here was a journal consecrated to a great and revolutionary cause, and the very first thing to catch a reader’s eye was, not only an advertisement, but a facetious advertisement at that—a Pill, without a Pill’s robust familiarity—a commercial cackle issuing from the “Novum’s” august and oracular mouth.... For the first time in her life Mrs. Pratt had wielded the blue pencil, tearing the rubbishy proof-paper in the energy with which she did so. Mr. Strong’s blue eyes, bluer for the contrast with his red knot of a tie, had watched her face, but he had said nothing. He was willing to humour her....
But when all was said and done he was an editor, and no sooner was Amory’s back turned than he had restoredthe announcement. The paper had appeared, and there had been a row....
“Then I appeal to Pratt,” Mr. Strong had said, with all the good-nature in the world. “I take it the ‘Novum’s’ a serious enterprise, and not just a hobby?”
Cosimo had glanced a little timidly at his wife. Then he had replied thoughtfully.
“I don’t know. I’m not so sure. That is, I’m not so sure it oughtn’t to be a serious enterpriseanda hobby. The world’s best work is always done for love—that’s another way of calling it a hobby—you see what I mean—Nietzsche has something about it somewhere or other—or if he hasn’t Ruskinhas——”
Any number of effective replies had been open to Mr. Strong, but he had used none of them. Instead his eyes had given as it were a flick to Amory’s face. The proprietor’s proprietor had continued indignantly.
“It ruins the whole effect! It’sunspeakablyvulgar! After that glowing, that impassioned Foreword—this! Hardly a month ago that lovely apostrophe to Truth Naked—that beautiful image of her stark and innocent on our banners but with a forest of bright bayonets bristling about her—and nowthis! It’s revolting!”
But Mr. Strong had himself written that impassioned Foreword, and knew all about it. Again he had given his proprietor’s wife that quietly humouring look.
“Do you mean that the ‘Novum’s’ going to refuse advertisements?”
“I mean that I blue-pencilled that one myself.”
“And what about the others—the ‘Eden’ and the Suffrage Shop and Wyron’s Lectures?”
“They’re different. Theyarethe Cause. You said yourself that the ‘Novum’ was going to be a sort of generalissimo, and these the brigades of whatever they’re called. They are, at any rate, doing the Work. Isthatdoing any Work, I should like to know?”
Mr. Strong had refrained from flippancy.—“I see what you mean,” he had replied equably. “At the same time, if you’re going to refuse advertisements the thing’s going to cost a good deal more money.”
“Well?” Amory had replied, as who might say, “Has money been refused you yet?”
Strong had given a compliant shrug—“All right. That means I censor the advertisements, I suppose. New industry. Very well. The ‘Eden’ and Wyron’s Lectures and Week-end Cottages and the Plato Press only, then. I’ll strike out that ‘Platinum: False Teeth Bought.’ But I warn you it will cost more.”
“Never mind that.”
And so the incident had ended.
But perhaps Mrs. Pratt’s sensitiveness of eye was not the only cause of the rejection of that offending advertisement. Another reason might have lain in her present relation with her sometime fellow-student of the McGrath School of Art, Dorothy Tasker. For that relation had suffered a change since the days when the two girls had shared a shabby day-studio in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At that time, now five years ago, Amory Towers had been thrust by circumstances into a position of ignoble envy of her friend. She had been poor, and Dorothy’s people (or so she had supposed) very, very wealthy. True, poor Dorothy, without as much asa single spark of talent, had nevertheless buckled to, and, in various devious ways, had contrived to suck a parasitic living out of the wholesome body of real art; none the less, Amory had conceived her friend to be of the number of those who play at hardship and independence with a fully spread table at home for them to return to when they are tired of the game. But the case was entirely changed now. Amory frankly admitted that she had been mistaken in one thing, namely, that if those people of Dorothy’s had more money, they had also more claims upon it, and so were relatively poor. Amory herself was now very comfortably off indeed. By that virtue and good management which the envious call luck, she had now money, Cosimo’s money, to devote to the regeneration of the world. Dorothy, married to the good-tempered and shiftless Stan, sometimes did not know which way to turn for the overdue quarter’s rent.
Now among her other ways of making ends meet Dorothy had for some years done rather well out of precisely that kind of work which Amory refused to allow the “Novum” to touch—advertisements. She had wormed herself into the services of this firm and that as an advertisement-adviser. But her contracts had begun in course of time to lapse, one or two fluky successes had not been followed up, and two children had further tightened things. Nor had Stan been of very much help. Amory despised Stan. She thought him, not a man, but a mere mouth to be fed. Real men, like Cosimo, always had money, and Amory was quite sure that, even if Cosimo had not inherited a fortune fromhis uncle, he would still have contrived to make himself the possessor of money in some other way.
Therefore Amory was even kinder to Dorothy than she was to Dickie Lemesurier of the Suffrage Shop, to Katie Deedes of the “Eden,” and to Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, who ran the “Lectures on Love.” But somehow—it was a little difficult to say exactly how, but there it undoubtedly was—Dorothy did not accept her kindnesses in quite the proper spirit. One or two she had even rejected—gently, Amory was bound to admit, but still a rejection. For example, there had been that little rebuff (to call it by its worst name for a moment) about the governess. Amory had, in Miss Britomart Belchamber, the most highly-qualified governess for Corin and Bonniebell that money and careful search had been able to obtain; Dorothy lived less than a quarter of an hour’s walk away; it would have been just as easy for Britomart to teach four children as to teach two; but Dorothy had twisted and turned and had finally said that she had decided that she couldn’t put Amory to the trouble. And again, when the twins had had their party, Amory would positively havelikedNoel and Jackie to come and dance “Twickenham Ferry” in those spare costumes and to join in those songs from the Book of Caroline Ditties; but again an excuse had been made. And half a dozen similar things had driven Amory to the conclusion, sadly against her will, that the Taskers were taking up that ridiculous, if not actually hostile attitude, of the poor who hug their pride. It was not nice between old friends. Amory could say with a clear conscience that she hadnot refused Dorothy’s help in the days when the boot had been on the other leg. She was not resentful, but really it did look very much like putting on airs.
But of course that stupid Stanhope Tasker was at the bottom of it all. Amory did not so much mind his not having liked her from the first; she would have been sorry to let a trifle like that ruffle her equanimity; but it was evident that he did not in the least realize his position. She was quite sure, in the first place, that he couldn’t afford (or rather Dorothy couldn’t afford) to pay eighty pounds for that flat, plus another twenty for the little office they had annexed and used as a nursery. And in the next place he dressed absurdly above his position. Cosimo dressed for hygiene and comfort, in cellular things and things made of nonirritant vegetable fibre; but those absurdly modish jackets and morning-coats of Stan’s had, unless Amory was very much mistaken, to be bought at the expense of real necessaries. And so with their hospitality. In that too, they tried to cut a dash and came very near to making themselves ridiculous. Amory didn’t want to interfere; she couldn’t plan and be wise for everybody; she had her own affairs to attend to; but she was quite sure that the Taskers would have done better to regulate their hospitality as hospitality was regulated at The Witan—that was, to make no special preparation, but to have the door always open to their friends. But no; the Taskers must make a splash. They must needs “invite” people and be a little stand-offish about people coming uninvited. They were “At home” and “Not at home” for all the world as if they had been importantpeople. But Amory would have thought herself very stupid to be taken in by all this ceremony. For example, the last time she and Cosimo had been asked to the flat to dinner she knew that they had been “worked off” only because the Taskers had had the pheasants given by somebody, and very likely the fish too. And it would have been just like Stan Tasker’s insolence had he asked them because heknewthat the Pratts did not eat poor beasties that should have been allowed to live because of their lovely plumes, nor the pretty speckled creatures that had done no harm to the destroyer who had taken them with a hook out of their pretty stream.
But, kind to her old friend as Amory was always ready to be, she did not feel herself called upon to go out of her way to be very nice to her friend’s husband. He had no right to expect it after his rudeness to Edgar Strong about the “Novum.” For it had been about the “Novum” that Stan had given Strong that talking-to. Much right (Amory thought hotly) he had to talk! Just because he consorted with men who counted their money in rupees and thought nothing of shouldering their darker-skinned brothers off the pavement, he thought he was entitled to put an editor into his place! But the truth, of course, was, that that very familiarity prevented him from really knowing anything about these questions at all. Because an order was established, he had not imagination enough to see how it could have been anything different. His mind (to give it that name) was of the hidebound, official type, and too many limited intelligences of that kind stopped the cause of Imperial progress to-day. Or rather, they tried to stopit, and perhaps thought they were stopping it; but really, little as they suspected it, they were helping more than they knew. A pig-headed administration does unconsciously help when, out of its own excesses, a divine discontent is bred. Mr. Suwarree Prang had been eloquent on that very subject one afternoon not very long ago. A charming man! Amory had listened from her hammock, rapt. Mr. Prang did the “Indian Review” for the “Novum,” in flowery but earnest prose; and as he actually was Indian, and did not merely hobnob with a few captains and subalterns home on leave, it was to be supposed that he would know rather more of the subject than Mr. StanhopeTasker!——
And Mr. Stanhope Tasker had had the cheek to tell Mr. Strong that he didn’t know what he was talking about!
Amory felt that she could never be sufficiently thankful for the chance that had thrown Mr. Strong in her way. She had always secretly felt that her gifts were being wasted on such minor (but still useful) tasks as the “Eden” Restaurant and the “Love Lectures” Agency. But her personal exaltation over Katie Deedes and the others had caused her no joy. What had given her joy had been the immensely enlarged sphere of her usefulness; that was it, not the odious vanity of leadership, but the calm and responsible envisaging of a task for which not one in ten thousand had the vision and courage and strength. And Edgar Strong had shown her these things. Of course, if he had put them in these words she might have suspected him of trying to flatter her; but as a matter of fact he had not said asingle word about it. He had merely allowed her to see for herself. That was his way: to all-but-prove a thing—to take it up to the very threshold of demonstration—and then apparently suddenly to lose interest in it. And that in a way was his weakness as an editor. Amory, whom three or four wieldings of the blue pencil had sufficed to convince that there was nothing in journalism that an ordinary intelligence could not master in a month, realized this. She herself, it went without saying, always saw at once exactly what Mr. Strong meant; she personally liked those abrupt and smiling stops that left Mr. Strong’s meaning as it were hung up in the air; but it was a mistake to suppose that everybody was as clever as she and Mr. Strong. “I’s” had to be dotted and “t’s” crossed for the multitude. But it was at that point that Mr. Strong always became almost languid.
It was inevitable that the man who had thus revealed to her, after a single glance at her, such splendid and unsuspected capacities within herself, should exercise a powerful fascination over Amory. If he had seen all this in her straight away (as he assured her he had), then he was a man not lightly to be let go. He might be the man to show her even greater things yet. He puzzled her; but he appeared to understand her; and as both of them understood everybody else, she was aware of a challenge in his society that none other of her set afforded her. He could even contradict her and go unsacked. Prudent people, when they sack, want to know what they are sacking, and Amory did not know.Therefore Mr. Strong was quite sure of his job until she should find out.
Another thing that gave Mr. Strong this apparently offhand hold over her was the confidential manner in which he had warned her not to take Mr. Brimby, the novelist, too seriously. For without the warning Amory, like a good many other people, might have committed precisely that error.... But when Mr. Brimby, taking Amory apart one day, had expressed in her ear a gentle doubt whether Mr. Strong was quite “sound” on certain important questions, Amory had suddenly seen. Mr. Strong had “cut” one of Mr. Brimby’s poignantly sorrowful sketches of the East End—seen through Balliol eyes—and Mr. Brimby was resentful. She did not conceal from herself that he might even be a little envious of Mr. Strong’s position. He might have been wiser to keep his envy to himself, for, while mere details of routine could hardly expect to get Amory’s personal attention, there was one point on which Mr. Strong was quite “sound” enough for Amory—his sense of her own worth and of how that worth had hitherto been wasted. And Mr. Strong had not been ill-natured about Mr. Brimby either. He had merely twinkled and put Amory on her guard. And because he appeared to have been right in this instance, Amory was all the more disposed to believe in his rightness when he gave her a second warning. This was about Wilkinson, the Labour Member. He was awfully fond of dear old Wilkie, he said; he didn’t know a man more capable in some things than Wilkie was; but it wouldbe foolish to deny that he had his limitations. He wasn’t fluid enough; wanted things too much cut-and-dried; was a little inclined to mistake violence for strength; and of course the whole point about the “Novum” was that itwasfluid....
“In fact,” Mr. Strong concluded, his wary blue eyes ceasing suddenly to hold Amory’s brook-brown ones and taking a reflective flight past her head instead, “for a paper like ours—I’m hazarding this, you understand, and keep my right to reconsider it—I’m not sure that a certain amount of fluidity isn’t a Law....”
Amory nodded. She thought it excellently put.
Amorysometimes thought, when she took her bird’s-eye-view of the numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in the columns of the “Novum,” that she would have allowed almost any of them to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron’s “Lectures on Love.” She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking fondness, no more; but there it was—just that one blind spot that mars even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit.
“No, no,” she always said, “I don’t defend it. Twenty things are more important really, but I can’t help it. I suppose it’s because we know all about Laura and Walter themselves.”
“Perhaps so,” Mr. Strong would musingly concede.
Anybody who was anybody knew all about Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron and a certain noble defeat in their lives that was to be accounted as more than a hundred ordinary victories. That almost historic episode had just shown everybody who was anybody what the world’s standards were really worth. Hitherto the Wyrons have been spoken of both as a married coupleand as “Walter Wyron” and “Laura Beamish” separately; let the slight ambiguity now be cleared up.
Mrs. Cosimo Pratt became on occasion Miss Amory Towers for reasons that began and ended in her profession as a painter; and everybody who was anybody was as well aware that Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture “Barrage,” was in reality Mrs. Cosimo Pratt, as the great mass of people who were nobody knew that Miss Elizabeth Thompson, the painter of “The Roll Call,” was actually Lady Butler. But not so with the Wyrons. Reasons, not of business, nor yet of fame, but of a burning and inextinguishable faith, had led to their noble equivocation. Deeply seated in the hearts both of Walter and of Laura had lain a passionate non-acceptance of the merely parroted formula of the Wedding Service. So searching and fundamental had this been that by the time their various objections had been disposed of little had remained that had seemed worth bothering about; and in one sense they had not bothered about it. True, in another sense they had bothered, and that was precisely where the defeat came in; but that did not dim the splendour of the attempt. To come without further delay to the point, the Wyrons had married, under strong protest, in the ordinary everyday way, Laura submitting to the momentary indignity of a ring; but thereafter they had magnificently vindicated the New Movement (in that one aspect of it) by not saying a word about the ceremony of their marriage to anybody—no, not even to the people who were somebody. Then they had flown off to the Latin Quarter.
It had not been in the Latin Quarter, however, that the true character of their revolt had first shown. Perhaps—nobody knows—their relation had not been singular enough there. Perhaps—there were people base enough to whisper this—they had feared the singularity of “letting on.” It is easy to do in the Boul’ Mich’ as the Boul’ Mich’ does. The real difficulties begin when you try to do in London what London permits only as long as you do it covertly.
And if there had been a certain covertness about their behaviour when, after a month, they had returned, what a venial and pardonable subterfuge, to what a tremendous end! Amory herself, up to then, had not had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under a stigma, their overt lives had been one impassioned and beautiful protest against any assumption whatever on the part of the world of a right to make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a gospel than this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter’s; great as the number of the born was, his mission was the protection of a greater number still. The best aspects both of legitimacy and of illegitimacy were to be stereoscoped in the perfect birth. And he now had, in quite the strict sense of the word, a following. The same devoted faces followed him from the Lecture at the Putney Baths on the Monday to that at the Caxton Hall on the Thursday, from his ascending the platform at the Hampstead Town Hall on the Tuesday to his addressing of a garden-party from under the copper-beech at The Witan on the Sundayafternoon. And in course of time the faithfulness of the followers was rewarded. They graduated, so to speak, from the seats in the body of the building to the platform itself. There they supported Laura, and gave her a countenance that she no longer needed (for she had earned her right to wear her wedding-ring openly now), and flocked about the lecturer afterwards, not as about a mere man, but rather as seeing in him the physician, the psychologist, the expert, the helper, and the setter of crooked things straight that he was.
As a lecturer—may we say as a prophet?—Walter had a manner original and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision and less upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to put on “side,” but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the stage—everybody knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek Theatre—had taught him the value of the large and simple statement of large and simple things; anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his audiences as accompany them, chattily and companionably, through the various windings of his subject. With his hands thrust unaffectedly into the pockets of his knickers, and a sort of sublimated “Well, here we are again” expression on his face, he allayed his hearers’ natural timidity before the magnitude of his mission, and gave them a direct and human confab. on a subject that returned as it were from its cycle of vastness to simple personal experience again. His every sentence seemed to say, “Don’t be afraid; it’s nothing really; soon you’ll be as much at your ease in dealing with these things as I am; just let me tell you an anecdote.”No wonder Laura held her long and muscular neck very straight above her hand-embroidered yoke. Everybody understood that unless she adopted some sort of an attitude her proper pride in such a married lover must show, which would have been rather rubbing it in to the rest of her sex. So she booked dates for new lectures almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was invaded at the end of the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level of those below, she was there in person as the final demonstration of how well these things actually would work as soon as Society had decided upon some concerted action.
Corin and Bonniebell, Amory’s twins, did not attend Walter’s Lectures. It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night. But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have passed—had in fact passed—an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to speak, had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures—the one on “The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?”—that Miss Belchamber had first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled her out, first because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond’s Collegiate Institution—the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah with the garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit of a roasted chestnut shows when the rind splits—and secondly because of her admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an athlete, and could shut up her long and massive limbs in a wicker chair like a clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin that Walter’s father could not secureher for the New Greek Society’s revival of “Europa” at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick mentally. That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure that she was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively attracted by fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be ductile under the influence of Walter’s ideas than that she should have just wit enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called “practical” questions that Walter always answered at the close of the evening as patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss Belchamber told the twins stories, and danced “Rufty Tufty,” with them, and “Catching of Quails,” and was really cheap at her rather stiff salary. Cosimo loved to watch her at “Catching of Quails.” If the children did not grow up with a love of beauty after that, he said, he gave it up. (The twins, by the way, unconsciously served Amory as another example of Dorothy Tasker’s unreasonableness. As the mother of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy seemed rather to fancy herself as an experienced woman. But Amory could afford to smile at this pretension. There was a difference in age of a year and more between Noel and Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little, but she, Amory, could have told her a thing or two).
On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker’s visit to The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was growing chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the fallen leaves made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour before; certain points had struckhim in the course of conversation which he thought ought to be incorporated in the “Life and Work”; and it was a rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to interfere with the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of that, Amory herself was creating now, or at any rate was at the last preparatory stage that immediately precedes creation. Presently she would have taken the plunge and would be deep in the new number of the “Novum.” For the moment she was thinking of Mr. Strong.
As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names and definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made meanings—a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example, though a rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous advertisements waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of alert blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that it was likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a confession)—well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was candid about it, however, which they were often not.
Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She “liked” him, too,but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy’s actions, and Dorothy quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because the data were the same.
Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and without hateful false shame.
“Whatisthis relation of ours?” she had asked him, point-blank and fearlessly.
“Eh?” Mr. Strong had replied, a little startled.
“Theremustbe a relation of some sort between every two people who come into contact. I’m just wondering exactly what oursis.”
Then Mr. Strong had knitted his brows and had said, presently, “I see.... Have you read ‘The Tragic Comedians?’”—Amory had not, and the copy of the book which she had immediately ordered had not come yet. And then she too had knitted her brows. She had caught the trick from him.
“I suppose that what it really comes to is knowingyourself,” she had mused; and at that Mr. Strong had given her a quick approving look, almost as if he said that if she put in her thumb in the same place again she might pull out a plum very well worth having.
“And not,” Amory had continued, curiously heartened, “anything about the other person at all.”
“Good, good,” Mr. Strong had applauded under his breath; “have you Edward Carpenter’s book in thehouse, by the way?... Never mind: I’ll send you my copy.”
He had sent it. It was in Amory’s hand now. She had discovered that it had a catching and not easily identifiable smell of its own, of Virginia cigarettes and damp and she knew not what else, all mingled; and somehow the smell seemed quite as much an answer to the question she had asked as anything in the book itself.
Nor, despite Walter’s special knowledge of these indications, could she go to the Wyrons for diagnosis and advice. For one thing, there was her own position of high patronage to be considered; for another, splendidly daring as the Wyrons’ original protest had been, the Lectures had lately begun to have a little the air of a shop, over the counter of which admittedly valuable specifics were handed, but with a kind of “Andthe next article, please?” suspicion about it. Besides, the Wyrons, having no children, had of necessity to “chic” a little in cases where children formed a complicating element. Besides ... but anyway, Amory wasn’t going either to Laura Beamish or to Walter Wyron.
She made a charming picture as she walked slowly the length of the privet hedge and then turned towards the copper beech again. Mr. Strong had said that he liked her in that dress—an aluminium-grey one, very simple and very expensive, worn with a handsome Indian shawl, a gift of Mr. Prang’s, the mellow colour of which “led up” to the glowing casque of her hair; and she had smiled when Mr. Strong had added that Britomart Belchamber’s rough tabards and the half-gymcostume in which she danced “Rufty Tufty” would not have suited her, Amory, at all. Probably they wouldn’t—not as a regular thing. Cosimo liked those, especially when the wearer was largish; indeed, it was one of Cosimo’s humours to pose as Britomart’s admirer. But Amory was small, and never shut her limbs up like a multiple-lever in a basket chair, but drew her skirt down a foot or so below her toes instead whenever she sat down. She fancied, though Mr. Strong had never used the word, that the “Novum’s” editor found Miss Belchamber just a little hoydenish.
Amory wished that something would bring Mr. Strong up that afternoon. It was one of the days on which the editing of the “Novum” could take care of itself, and besides, they would actually be editing it together. For the next number but one—the forthcoming one was already passed—was to be their most important utterance yet. It was to indicate clearly, firmly and once for all, their Indian policy. The threatened failure of the monsoon made the occasion urgent, and Mr. Suwarree Prang himself had explained to Amory only the night before precisely what the monsoon was, and how its failure would provide, from the point of view of those who held that the present wicked regime of administration by the strong hand was at last tottering to its fall, a providential opportunity. It had struck Amory as wondrously romantic and strange that a meteorological condition halfway round the world, in a place she had never seen, should thus change the course of her quiet life in Hampstead; but, properly considered, no one thing in this wonderful world wasmore wonderful than another. It was Life, and Life, as she remembered to have read somewhere or other, is for the Masters of it. And she was beginning to find that after all these things only required a little confidence. It was as easy to swim in six miles deep of water, like that place in Cosimo’s atlas of which the name escaped her for the moment, as it was in six feet. And Mr. Prang had talked to her so long and so vividly about India that she sometimes found it quite difficult to realize that she had never been there.
Still wishing that Mr. Strong would come, she slowly left the garden and entered the house. In the hall she paused for a moment, and a tender little smile softened her face. She had stopped before the exquisite casts of the foot and the arm. Pensively she took the foot up from the console table, and then, coming to a resolution, she took the arm down from its hook on the wall. After all, beautiful as she had to admit them to be, the studio, and not the hall, was the proper place for them.
With the foot and Edward Carpenter in her left hand, and the plaster arm hugged to her right breast, she walked along the passage and sought the studio.
It was called the studio, and there certainly were canvases and easels and other artists’ paraphernalia there, but it was less used for painting than as a room for sitting and smoking and tea and discussion. It was a comfortable apartment. Rugs made islands on the thick cork floor-covering, and among the rugs were saddlebag chairs, a long adjustable chair, and a wide couch covered with faded tapestry. The room was an annex of corrugated iron lined with matchboarding,but electric-light fittings depended from the iron ties overhead, and in place of an ordinary hearth was a sort of stage one, with an imitation log of asbestos, which, when you put a match to it, broke into a licking of blue and yellow gas-jets. The north window occupied the whole of the garden end, and, facing it, was the large cartoon for Amory’s unfinished allegorical picture, “The Triumph of Humane Government.” High up and just within the door was the bell that answered to the button outside.
Amory was putting down the casts on a Benares tray when the ringing of this bell startled her. But as it rang in the kitchen also, she did not move to answer it. She stood listening, the fingers of one hand to her lips, those of the other still resting on the plaster shoulder. Then she heard a voice, and a moment later there came a tap at the door.
It was Mr. Strong.
He advanced, and did a thing he had not done before—lifted the hand she extended to his lips and then let it drop again. But Amory was not surprised. It was merely a new and natural expression of the homage he had never concealed, and even had Amory been vain enough to suppose that it meant anything more, the briskness of the “Good afternoon” that followed it would have disabused her. “Glad I found you,” Mr. Strong said. “I wanted to see you. Cosimo in?”
Her husband was always Cosimo to him, but in speaking to herself he used no name at all. It was as if he hesitated to call her Amory, and refused to call herMrs. Pratt. Even “Miss Towers” he had only used once, and that was some time ago.
Amory’s fingers left the cast, and Mr. Strong walked towards the asbestos log.—“May I?” he said, drawing forth a packet of Virginia cigarettes; and afterwards he put the match with which he lighted one of the cigarettes to the log. Amory drew up a small square footstool, and put her elbows on her knees and her interwoven fingers beneath her chin. Mr. Strong examined the end of his cigarette, and thrust his chin down into his red tie and his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Then he seemed to plunge into thought.
Suddenly he shot a glance at Amory, and said abruptly, “I suppose you’ve talked over the Indian policy with Cosimo?”
It was nice and punctilious of him, the way he always dragged Cosimo in, and Amory liked it. She felt sure that the editor of the “Times,” calling on the Prime Minister’s wife, would not ignore the Prime Minister. But to-day she was a little abstracted—dull—she didn’t know exactly what; and so she replied, without moving, “Would you like him here? He’s busy with the ‘Life.’”
“Oh no, don’t trouble him then.”
There was a pause. Then, “I did talk to him about it. And to Mr. Prang,” Amory said.
“Oh. Hm. Quite so,” said Mr. Strong, looking at the toes of his brogues.
“Yes. Mr. Prang was here last night,” Amory continued, looking at the points of her own slippers.
“Yes.”
Again Mr. Strong’s chin was sunk into his red tie. He was rising and falling slowly on his toes. His eyes moved ruminatively sideways to the rug at Amory’s feet.
“Yes. Yes. I’ve been wondering——” he said thoughtfully.
“Well?”
“Oh, nothing really. I dare say I’m quite wrong. You see,Prang——”
“What?” Amory asked as he paused again.
There was a twinkle in the eyes that rose to Amory’s. Mr. Strong gave a slight shrug.—“Well—Prang!——” he said with humorous deprecation.
Amory was quick.—“Oh!—You don’t mean that Mr. Prang isn’t sound?”
“Sound? Perfectly, perfectly. And a most capable fellow. Only I’ve wondered once or twice whether he isn’t—you know—just a littletoocapable.... You see, we want to use Prang—not to have Prang usingus.”
Amory could not forbear to smile. If that was all that was troubling Mr. Strong she thought she could reassure him.
“I don’t think you’d have been afraid of that if you’d been here last night,” she replied quietly. “We were talking over England’s diabolical misrule, and I never knew Mr. Prang so luminous. It was pathetic—really. Cosimo was talking about that Rawal Pindi case—you know, of that ruffianly young subaltern drawing down the blinds and then beating the native.—‘Buthow do they take it?’ I asked Mr. Prang, rather scornfully, you know; and really I was sorry for the poor fellow, having to apologize for his country.—‘That’s it,’ he said sadly—it was really sad.—And he told me, frankly, that sometimes the poor natives pretended they were killed, and sometimes they announce that they’re going to die on a certain day, and they reallydodie—they’re so mystic and sensitive—it wasmostinteresting.... But what I mean is, that a gentle and submissive people like that—Mr. Prang admits that’s their weakness—I mean theycouldn’tuseus! It’s our degradation that we aren’t gentle and sensitive too. You see what I mean?”
“Oh, quite,” Mr. Strong jerked out. “Quite.”
“And that’s why I call Mr. Prang an idealist. There must be somethinginthe East. At any rate it was splendid moral courage on Prang’s part to say, quite openly, that they couldn’t do anything without the little handful of us here, but must simply go on suffering and dying.”
There fell one of the silences that usually came when Mr. Strong lost interest in a subject. Merely adding, “Oh, I’ve not a word to say against Prang, but——,” he began to rise and fall on his toes again. Then he stepped to the Benares table where the casts were. But he made no criticism of them. He picked the foot up, and put it down again. “I like it,” he said, and returned once more to the asbestos hearth. The silence fell again.
Amory, sitting on the footstool with her knees supporting her elbows and her wrists supporting her chin,would have liked to offer Mr. Strong a penny for his thoughts. She had had an odd, warm little sensation when he had picked up that cast of the perfect foot. She supposed he must know that it was her foot, but so widely had his thoughts been ranging that he had merely put it down again with an abstracted “I like it.” Amory was not sure that any other woman than herself would not have been piqued. Any other woman would have expected him either not to look at the thing, or else to say that it was small, or to ask whether the real one was as white, or something foolish like that. But Amory was superior to such things. She lived on higher levels. On these levels such an affront to the pure intellect as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love as a logical and defensible system—yes, perhaps; or a combination so happy of marriage and cohabitation as that of the Wyrons’—yes again; but anything lower she left to the stupid people who swallowed the conventions whole, including the convention of not being found out.—So she merely wondered about their relation again. Obviously, there mustbea relation. And yet his own explanation had been quite insufficient; it had been no explanation at all to ask her whether she had read “The Tragic Comedians” or whether she had Edward Carpenter in the house. No doubt it was flattering to her intelligence to suppose that she could “flash” at his meaning without further words on his part, but it was also a little irritating when the flash didn’t come. And, now that she came to think of it, except that he allowed it to be inferred that he found Britomart Belchambera bit lumpish, she didn’t know what he thought, not merely of herself, but of women at all.
And yet there was a passed-through-the-furnace look about him that might have piqued any woman. It was not conceivable that his eyes had softened only over inspired passages in proof, or that the tenderest speeches his lips had shaped had been the “Novum’s” rallying-cries to the devoted band of the New Imperialists. Amory was sure that his memory must be a maze of things, less spacious perhaps, but far more interesting than these. He looked widely now, but must have looked close and intense too. He pronounced upon the Empire, but, for all he was not married, must have probed deep into the palpitating human heart as well.
Amory was just thinking what a gage of intimacy an unembarrassed silence can be when Mr. Strong broke it. He lighted another cigarette at the end of the last, turned, threw the end on the asbestos log, and stood looking at the purring blue and yellow jets. No doubt he was full of the Indian policy again.
But as it happened it was not the Indian policy—“Oh,” Mr. Strong said, “I meant to ask you—Who was that fellow who came up here one day?”
This was so vague that when Amory said “What fellow?” Mr. Strong himself saw the vagueness, and laughed.
“Of course: ‘How big is a piece of wood?’—I mean the fellow who came to the Witan in a morning-coat?”
This was description enough. Amory’s back straightened a little.
“Oh, Stanhope Tasker! Oh, just the husband of a friend of mine. I don’t think you’ve met her. Why?”
Surely, she thought, Mr. Strong was not going to tell her that “Stanhope Tasker was an excellent fellow in his way, but——,” as he had said of Mr. Brimby, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr.Prang!——
“Oh, nothing much. Only that I saw him to-day,” Strong replied offhandedly.
“He’s often about. He isn’t a very busy man, I should say,” Amory remarked.
“Saw him in Charing Cross Road as I was coming out of the office,” Mr. Strong continued. “I don’t think he saw me though.”
“After his abominable manners to you that day I should think he’d be ashamed to look you in the face.”
For a moment Mr. Strong looked puzzled; then he remembered, and laughed again.
“Oh, I didn’t mind that in the least! Rather refreshing in fact. Far more likely he didn’t notice me because he had his wife with him. I think you said he was married?”
Amory was just about to say that Mr. Strong gave Stan far more magnanimity than he deserved when a thought arrested her. Dorothy in Charing Cross Road! As far as she was aware Dorothy had not been out of Hampstead for weeks, and even then kept to the less frequented parts of the Heath. It wasn’t likely....
Her eyes became thoughtful.
“Oh? That’s funny,” she said.
“What, that he shouldn’t see me? Oh no. They seemed far more interested in electric-light fittings.”
Amory’s eyes grew more thoughtful still—“Oh!” she said; and added, “Did you think her pretty?”
“Hm—in a way. Very well dressed certainly; they both were. But I don’t think these black Spanish types amuse me much,” Mr. Strong replied.
Dorothy a black Spanish type!
“Oh, do tell me what she had on!” said Amory brightly.
She rather thought she knew most of Dorothy’s dresses by this time.
A black Spanish type!
The task of description was too much for Mr. Strong, but he did his best with it. Amory was keenly interested. But she pocketed her interest for the present, and said quite banteringly and with an almost arch look, “Oh, I should have thought Mrs. Tasker exactly your type!”
Again the quick motion of Mr. Strong’s blue eyes suggested an audible click—“Oh? Why?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s no ‘why’ about it, of course. It’s the impression of you I had, that’s all. You see, you don’t particularly admire MissBelchamber——”
“Oh, come! I think Miss Belchamber’s an exceedingly nice girl,only——”
“Well, Laura Beamish, then. But I forgot; you don’t go to Walter’s Lectures. But I wonder whether you’d admire Laura?”
“If she’s black and Spanish you think I should?” He paused. “Is she?”
“No. Brown and stringy rather, and with eyes that open and shut very quickly.... But I’m very absurd. There’s no Law about these things really. Only, you see, I’ve no idea of the kind of woman youdoadmire?”
She said it smilingly, but that did not mean that she was not perfectly candid and natural about it too. Why not be natural about these things? Amory knew people who were natural enough about their preferred foods and clothing and houses; was a woman less than an entrée, or a bungalow, or a summer overcoat? Besides, it was so very much more intrinsically interesting. Walter Wyron had made a whole Lecture on it—Lecture No. II, “Types and Tact,” and Walter had barely touched the fringe of the subject. Amory wanted to go a little deeper than that. But she also wanted to get away from those vulgarized words and ready-made conclusions, and to have each case considered on its merits. Surely it ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person affected you pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences of aliaisonin the one case or of a rupture in the other!